Archive of February 2008
Gruber on product reviews: the feel of it, not the think of it
John Gruber, in his interview with Shawn Blanc, discusses his approach to writing reviews:
One of my favorite quotes of all time, probably my very favorite, is this one from Stanley Kubrick: “Sometimes the truth of a thing is not so much in the think of it, as in the feel of it.” A lot of times when I’m reviewing something, what I’m trying to do is capture the feel of it, rather than the think of it.
I think he usually succeeds in capturing “feel”. Wil Shipley’s first-impressions review of the MacBook Air is a great example of this, too.
04:58 PMSafari 3.1 to support downloadable web fonts, and paves the way for offline web applications
Safari 3.1, for OS X and Windows, is getting some major upgrades, including downloadable fonts (finally, a true sIFR replacement, something designers have been pining for forever), advanced CSS capabilities like transforms and animations, SQL data storage, and enhanced Javascript DOM functions that will make some scripts run hundreds of times faster.
Apple really seems to be pushing the envelope with Safari, but in a standards-compliant way. With the SQL and Javascript enhancements, Apple is positioning Safari as the premier platform for web applications. They’ve got something up their sleeve, with last year’s port of Safari to Windows and with MobileSafari on the iPhone — should be fun to find out what it is.
09:41 PMCollect information with Google Spreadsheets
Amazing new feature in Google Spreadsheets — it’s the perfect tool for informal surveying, and it’s a cinch to set up. Set up a spreadsheet, create a form that you can email (or post a link to) in a couple of clicks, and then literally watch the data populate your spreadsheet.
I’m planning on using this as a registration form for a client. Much easier (for me) than getting a form on the client’s website to populate a database, and then pulling the data back out. Hopefully there’ll eventually be a way to tie together Google Maps and Google Spreadsheets, so we can automatically map every registrant by ZIP.
06:22 PM